Apart from regular features associated with the then-newborn RTS genre, some interesting things were planned for this game:
The author of the article and the graphics set is Daniel Cook, the guy who did the superb graphics for Tyrian (you can see his distinct style even on the screenshot above).There were several interesting systems in Hard Vacuum. Some made it into future RTS games and some did not.
- Supply Lines: When you built a mining tower on a resource deposit, there was no need to manually build and manage drones to carry the minerals back and forth. Instead, a road was built from your base to the mine. Drones were automatically created when the mine had a full load and sent along the road to your base. Enemies could blast your supply line and interrupt your flow of resources. So protecting fixed supply lines became a bit part of the strategy.
- Variable Height Terrain: This was a 2D tile-based game intended to run on 386 and 486 machines. We had a full system of variable height terrain. Units on higher ground would have targeting advantages over units on lower grow
- Deformable terrain with flowing water and lava: You could blow huge holes in terrain with artillery in order to divert streams and lava. Drop a water bomb on a city and watch it wash away an entire troop. Drop a dirt bomb to create a mountain.
- Walls: Walls played a huge part in the game to give large defensive barriers to attack. These existed in Dune2, but were extended in HV
- Player created landscapes: Walls, base building, supply lines, and advanced terrain modification all contributed to a game where players built intricate maps during game play. We couldn't afford to spend lots of money building maps so instead we had to create fun systems that let players create unique and interesting combat situations.
Pretty sad it wasn't completed. Following Command & Conquer, the graphics would usually be pre-rendered "3D sprites", and almost no hand-drawn graphics were used anymore (although the graphics in, say, Warcraft II have the hand-drawn look about then). Don't know if the developers of Hard Vacuum would have pulled off everything they planned if the game were to be completed, but at lest in design the whole project was pretty much ahead of its time - especially taking into account that it had only one direct predecessor to draw inspiration from, Dune II.
